When some people say they have a bad memory, they’re referring to their ability – or inability – to remember a specific event that happened in their life. This is called episodic memory. By contrast, when people are trying to commit a series of facts to memory, as they often do when they are studying…

Rote learning is a memory method that involves repeating information over and over again. Also known as drilling, or more officially as distributed practice, it has been used in classrooms around the world to teach young children basics such as the alphabet and multiplication tables. Older learners use rote to encode a range of facts…